SANDY’S
DEVASTATION
costs low for ratepayers.”
“Since 1990, utilities and utility regulators have done a fantastic
job keeping down rates, cutting
costs, outsourced stuff, and that’s
fantastic,” said Steven Mitnick, an
energy consultant who advised former Gov. Eliot Spitzer in New York.
“We have very low rates. When we
have new challenges, it means you
can respond less quickly.”
Instead of spending money to
protect what we already have, experts also suggest there’s another
interim step just awaiting the political will to see it through: stop
building more homes and businesses where they too will require
protection. Nowhere in the region,
perhaps, is this more contested
than the Jersey Shore.
‘WE’LL REBUILD IT’
When Sandy barreled ashore in
New Jersey, storm surges of nearly 10 feet shredded boardwalks
in Atlantic City and crippled
an amusement park in Seaside
Heights, leaving a roller coaster in
a shambles, floating in the surf.
Three-story mansions were
swamped by floodwaters and buried in sand, some torn from their
foundations and lying on their
sides. Boats were carried away
HUFFINGTON
12.02.12
and flung onto dry land like toys.
Economic losses in the state are
estimated to be at least $9 billion
to $15 billion, according to Eqecat, a disaster modeling firm.
After flying over the Jersey
Shore in a helicopter the day after
Sandy’s landfall, the state’s governor, Chris Christie, called the
damage “unthinkable.” He vowed
to bring back what was lost, saying there is “no question in my
mind we’ll rebuild it.”
“I don’t believe in a state like
ours, where the Jersey Shore is such
a part of life, that you just pick up
and walk away,” he told reporters.
But in the view of many landuse experts, the governor had it
backwards: a lot of that development never should have been built
there in the first place, given the
mounting and increasingly wellunderstood dangers posed by
coastal surges. For them, the catastrophe Christie was flying over
was far from unthinkable.
Situated between two of the
largest metropolitan areas in the
nation, New York and Philadelphia, the Jersey Shore is a prime
location for waterfront development. And over the past few decades, it has become one of the
most densely developed coastlines
in the country.
Population growth along the
New Jersey coast has soared,